Seeing the Invisible: When MRI Learns to Think Like PET
Seeing the Invisible: When MRI Learns to Think Like PET MRI is easy to respect. It is detailed, familiar, non-radioactive, and available in far more clinical settings than PET. It shows the brain’s structure with admirable discipline: folds, volumes, atrophy, lesions, the anatomical furniture of disease. PET is less polite. FDG-PET asks a different question: not only what has changed in the brain’s shape, but where the brain has stopped consuming glucose normally. In Alzheimer’s disease, that functional signal matters. The cruel part is that PET is expensive, less widely available, and involves radiation exposure. Healthcare, as usual, gives clinicians the useful thing and then hides it behind cost, infrastructure, and risk. ...